


Dreamtime

by Roses



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: Friendship, Gen, One Shot, POV Female Character, POV First Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-08
Updated: 2012-05-08
Packaged: 2017-11-05 01:25:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,975
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/400390
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Roses/pseuds/Roses
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><b>Dreamtime</b><br/><i>Proper noun</i><br/>1. (Australian Aboriginal mythology) The time of the creation of the world, by the ancestors out of their own essence.<br/>2.  Fourth planet of the Amada System in the Omega Nebula. Site of the wreck of the <i>SSV Normandy</i>. </p>
<p>Victoria Shepard returns to the place where she died.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dreamtime

**Author's Note:**

  * For [TigerDragon](https://archiveofourown.org/users/TigerDragon/gifts).



> When I asked [TigerDragon](http://archiveofourown.org/users/TigerDragon) what she wanted for her birthday, she asked me to write something for her FemShep. Writing for someone else's character is a total nightmare, and I have no idea how effective the results are, but I love her, and so I did it anyway :)

I stand shin-deep in the snow on the surface of Alchera. It is like standing at the end of the world. I am aware of the cold through my greaves only distantly. As though it happens to somebody else. It seems fitting somehow. 

I am no longer human. All physical sensation has been reduced to something that is less than experience: It is data to be processed. 

The blizzard swallows everything, turns the wreck of the _Normandy_ into a collection of phantoms: Spires of twisted, blackened metal that hang as heavy as shadows—unmoving, unchanging, immutable, in a landscape that is forever being formed and reformed by the howl of the wind and the onslaught of fresh snow. 

She is no longer a ship where people live, and die, and grieve. She is a hazy ruin that looms against the heavy sky. Jutting shards of wreckage suspended in eternity.

* * *

“I'm sorry, Mordin, what were you saying?”

He stared at me for a moment with his featureless black eyes, and inclined his head slightly to one side. He looked like an animal listening a high-pitched sound, but the illusion did not convince me. I knew him too well for that. I could see his mind work quickly and efficiently behind those eyes. I could see him study me like a specimen in a lab. 

I did not know whether it was out of concern, or curiosity. 

“It is a fitting place. Appropriate,” he said. The words struggled to keep up with the ticking-over of his mind. “Soldiers live. Die. We all do. Best we can hope for is to hope we aren't forgotten. To have helped. To end up in a place that remembers us.”

I frowned at him for a moment, and sat forwards. Gathered my hands between my knees. The blue light of the new _Normandy_ 's shields flickered through the square viewport in the ceiling of my quarters. It caught on every scar and furrow of his skin and, for a moment, made him look far, far older than he was. Than any salarian had any right to be. Maybe, at the end of the day, all of these things are relative: Perhaps a salarian could be as tired and weary at thirty-five as an asari matriarch would be at a thousand. 

I was a little over thirty now, and felt as though I had lived through the passing of an age. Before all of this was over, I would mostly likely feel like I had lived through more than one. 

“Alchera is a dead, frozen wasteland a thousand light years away from where these men and women were born,” I told him, more sharply than I had intended to. “From their friends and their families. From the Alliance that is supposed to protect them when it can, and return them to the people who care about them when it can't.”

_They shouldn't be sending me out here with plans for a memorial, and to scoop up the tags of two dozen dead soldiers. They should be bringing these people home._

Mordin blinked, and stared at me. 

He came up here to discuss the surface conditions on Alchera before I took the shuttle down. I don't know when the conversation veered away from that. If I had noticed, then perhaps I could have stopped it. 

“Perhaps I have made a mistake,” Mordin told me in the voice of someone who is well used to thinking faster than anyone could keep up. I don't know for sure, but I suspect he even feels that way among other salarians. “I cross-referenced Alliance databases with Cerberus scans and intel. Alchera is not well documented. Needed to be aware of local conditions. Composition of atmosphere. Average surface temperature. Other factors contributing to increased risk which may require preparation or modification—”

Despite the darkness that settled slowly on my mind like snow, I couldn't help but smile at him. 

“Are you going somewhere with this, Mordin?”

“Yes!” he said, as though he had only just remembered it himself. “My point is: Several Alliance databases note the name, Alchera, as well as the names of the moons... Wandjina, Baiame, Uluru... As references to the mythology of Aboriginal Australians on Earth.”

I watched the fluted blue light that scrolled between the glass of the viewport and the stars. Something tugged at the corner of my mouth, and I pushed my hand lazily through my hair. 

“Uluru is the name of a rock formation in Australia,” I ventured, and tried not to let him see that he had out-witted me on the religious history of a planet that he had never even visited. 

“Yes,” Mordin agreed emphatically. “Planet was named by Australian survey ship exploring the Omega Nebula in 2179. Wandjina are rain spirits. Very old. Ancient. Baiame is named for the creator god. Alchera is Arrernte word for Dreamtime. Interesting concept. Time before time. When everything was dreamed into being.”

Mordin got to his feet, and began to pace the space at the foot of the bed. He did not hurry. He was slow. Methodical. Drumming the tips of his fingers against his mouth. 

“Only not quite so simple. Not only in the past. Something that happens contemporaneously with all life. Something that continues beyond our death. Eternal.”

The corner of my mouth twitched again, but this time it managed to make it all the way into a lopsided kind of smile. It was not the first time that I'd heard him talk about religion, or that I'd heard that faraway tone that came into his voice when he did. I had started to think that it was his way of coming to terms with what he had done. 

“And you believe in all of that?”

“Perhaps,” Mordin said, and shrugged his narrow shoulders. “Perhaps not. Tempting to believe that those we have lost are still with us somehow.”

His pacing took him to the feet of the stairs, and he gave me a small, curt nod before he climbed them. 

“Be careful down there, Shepard,” he told me. “Surface atmosphere close to thirty-eight percent ammonia. We have approximately twenty-six hours until the crash site begins to turn away from the sun. Temperature will drop to almost minus fifty. Coolant in the shuttles thrusters will freeze. Your envirosuit will shut down within two hours.”

Mordin paused by the door, and turned around to face me. 

“Do what you must do down there, Commander. But be quick.”

* * *

The snow has begun to clear—clouds of ice and methane pass high overhead, between stars that glisten like shards of broken glass in the evening of Alchera. The system's own star hangs low on the horizon, dim and distant at the centre of a shockwave of blue light. The aurora drifts in ribbons of green and purple around the corona that it casts onto the heavy atmosphere.

I struggle to find footing in the snow. The cold is inside of me: It seizes every joint and muscle. Turns me into something made of flesh and ice. A statue suspended in the haze of bright and star-like frost. 

The _Normandy_ is cracked open around me. Massive. The ruins of a city forgotten long ago. Abandoned to the endless passage of time. 

I look down at the clutch of blackened dog tags in my hand. They feel far heavier than they have any right to be. I cannot look away from them, and no matter how hard that I try, I can't bring myself to believe that these people are in some kind of better place. Maybe they are, and Mordin is right. For their sakes, I hope that he is. But if belief was ever part of what I am, then that ended a long time ago now. 

I am more machine than human. No longer the hand that holds the gun. I am the weapon itself. 

I drop the dog tags into the snow, and feel with my frozen fingers for the catch on my helmet until it comes free. The wind of Alchera is bitterly cold against my naked skin, and the methane and ammonia burns my mouth and my lungs as it desperately tries to drown me. I close my eyes, and breathe. Every cell in my body begins to run out of oxygen, right up until the cybernetic implants that run right through me begin to compensate for it. 

The tiny flakes of ice catch in my hair and on my eyelashes, and I wonder how long it will take me to asphyxiate. 

I remember this feeling: Alchera spreading out bright and clear and endless, as what was left of the _Normandy_ disintegrated around me. I drifted, cut loose among the stars. The air hoses of my armour severed, and the life slowly draining out into the vacuum. I stared down into the twist of blizzard and solar wind that ran though the atmosphere, and I fell. 

Through the sting and water in my eyes, I can just make out a figure coming through the ruins. Even in the gloaming I can make out the unusual quality of its movement. The curves and angles of its armour. If Mordin was here, then perhaps he would believe that it was some spirit from between the worlds, come to return me to the rest of my crew. To all the people that I have lost down here. 

I am far too practical for that. 

Garrus cuts quickly and cleanly across the snow between us, and I ease the helmet back over my hair and fasten the catches. Almost immediately, his voice cuts through the static on the comms channel. 

“Commander?”

I pick up the dog tags, and begin to make my way down the perfect, sparkling white of the slope. I cannot see his face through the glass panels in his visor, but I can hear the strain in his voice. 

“What the hell do you think you're doing, Shepard? I've been trying to raise you for an hour. How long have you been breathing this soup? We need get you back to the _Normandy_.”

I raise a weary hand to silence him. 

“I'm fine, Garrus,” I tell him, and spare one last glance at the spires of twisted, blackened metal—the contorted wreck that used to be my ship. I have known him a long time and I probably owe him more of an explanation than that. Eventually, I manage: “I... I wanted to know if it would kill me. If Cerberus had put something into me that meant that I could breathe down here.”

Garrus looks back towards the shuttle, in the blueness of the evening, it is almost invisible.

“So?” he says. “What did you find out?”

I am staring down at the dog tags in my hand again.

“I... Don't know,” I tell him slowly, as though the words have frozen my mouth. “I don't know what I am.”

Maybe he moves too quickly, or maybe it is just that the ice has started to work into my brain and my thoughts have slowed to a crawl. Either way, when he reaches out and puts his hand onto my shoulder I am not expecting it. 

I start, and Garrus waits for me to recover myself. Watches me from somewhere behind his visor. He looks more like a machine than a living, breathing thing. I suppose that, really, we both do. 

“Well,” he says. “Whatever you are, it is good enough for me. Now, are you coming, Shepard, or do I have to take down the Collectors by myself?”

I smirk, and let him turn me back towards the shuttle. 

“In your dreams, Vakarian,” I tell him. 

Through the snow of static in my ear, I hear him laugh. 

“Oooh,” he teases me. “Now that sounds like a challenge.”


End file.
